The special liquidators Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) have been given a period of four months to sell its the €27 billion loan book.

The state-run bank went into liquidation on 7 February, 2013 and the government had said that the loans would be sold by August and any assets not sold till that time would be transferred to the National Asset Management Agency for sale over time.

Minister for Finance Michael Noonan has now allowed four months to KPMG’s Kieran Wallace and Eamonn Richardson, the special liquidators of the bank, till 30 November, 2013 to complete the valuation process on the loans and till 31 December, 2013 to complete the sale of assets. The additional time will allow the liquidators to increase efforts to find a buyer for about 6,000 commercial loans.

The minister has asked the liquidators to apply two forms of discount for the loans as part of the valuation process. A discount rate of 4.5 per cent will be applied to determine the valuation of future cash flows of various loans and a discount of 2.3 per cent will be applied to all the loans to compensate for security and title issues associated with the assets.

The liquidators have appointed UBS and PricewaterhouseCoopers to complete the price valuations of the loans.